Wow was she cool.
What I do is drive a snorkel boat. One of the big attractions of what we do is put people in the water with the Hawaiian Spinner Dolphin. Damn cool job finding the pods watching their behavior and getting everybody in the water out front of the pods. So many times I have had people almost being able to touch the dolphin as they swim around and under our people floating on the surface.
So this morning I am cruising along side a berthing pod of twelve or so dolphin. Mixed in were three to four little babies between 15 and 24 inches. The dolphin are just cruising right off my bow and everybody was getting great pictures and video of the dolphin. I was having my deckhand get everybody set with their mask and snorkel when all of a sudden the pod stopped and then popped up about 30 yards behind the boat. I thought briefly a little odd that they stopped but hey good situation for my poeple to get infront of the dolphin.
Well in a just a second or two the pod was now 100 yards or so behind the boat and as quick as I can turn the boat around the pod is 200 plus yards and beating flippers. I knew that something had changed their course but I didnt expect to see it right next to us.
Ten feet off my starboard side and not even ten feet under the surface there she was. She was on the same course as I was and barely moving 2 knots. She maintained the same depth for 20-30 seconds while we just cruised with right along with her. I am not kidding, her mouth was two feet wide. I was driving a 35 foot boat and she was more then 1/3 of the boat length.
Everybody on the boat that was just about ready to swim with dolphin
was now looking at a very big shark. We were in only about 50 feet of water at the time and could see the bottom, but she finally went down and managed to get away from us.
I then decided that the best thing to do was to turn back to the north where I knew more dolphin were at Pokai Bay and snorkel up that way instead of the normal spots back to the south in the direction she was heading. I was amazed with everybody I had onboard as when we made our dolphin drops everybody went into the water.
I asked this one guy who got some great pictures to email me some, when he does I will post the pictures.
Jack
"Ok you whitie tourists, jump in!"
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